Velocity Scripting: Power of Personalization

Unleashing the Power of Personalization: A Closer Look at Velocity Scripting in Marketo

Introduction:

In today's digital marketing landscape, personalization is key to capturing audience attention and driving engagement. One of the powerful feature that Marketo offers to achieve this is Velocity scripting. In this blog post, we'll dive into the world of Velocity scripting, exploring its purpose, benefits, drawbacks, and how it compares to dynamic content in Marketo. We'll also provide you with step-by-step examples to help you understand and utilize this robust feature.

What is Velocity Scripting?

Velocity scripting is an invaluable scripting language integrated within Marketo's platform. It empowers marketers to infuse their marketing campaigns with highly personalized and dynamic content. By embedding logic and variables directly into email templates. Velocity scripting enables marketers to tailor content based on each individual recipient's data.

Why Use Velocity Scripting?

Advantages

Velocity scripting offers numerous advantages that can take your marketing efforts to the next level:

Personalization: With Velocity scripting, you can create truly personalized content by leveraging recipient-specific data, such as demographic information, behavior data, and custom fields stored in Marketo.

Efficiency: Say goodbye to manual content customization. Velocity scripting automates the process based on predefined conditions, saving you time and effort.

Real-time Updates: Dynamic data changes as recipients interact with your campaigns. Velocity scripting ensures that your content stays up to date, providing real-time information to your audience.

Flexibility: The extensive capabilities of Velocity scripting encompass conditional statements, loops, and formatting options, enabling you to handle complex logic and generate dynamic content.

Disadvantages:

Learning : Utilizing Velocity scripting requires a level of familiarity with the scripting language or the involvement of a developer.

Errors: Incorrect implementation or syntax issues may occur if Velocity scripting is not used correctly.

Time: Creating dynamic content with Velocity scripting may take longer compared to static content creation.

Velocity Scripting vs. Dynamic Content in Marketo:

Although both Velocity scripting and dynamic content in Marketo enable personalization, they differ in several ways:

Flexibility and Advanced Scripting: Velocity scripting provides a broader range of capabilities, including complex logic implementation and dynamic content generation from various data sources.

Simplicity and Ease of Use: Dynamic content in Marketo is better suited for simpler personalization needs, such as displaying different content blocks based on lead attributes or segmentation rules.

Each Marketo instance can create only maximum of 20 Segments which limits the use of Dynamic content to this limit range, but using Velocity scripting eliminates this limit issues.

Simple and Powerful Velocity Scripting Examples:

How to create a Email script token in to your Program

• Go to the respective Program where you need to have the email script.
• Go the Token TAB in the Program.
• Pull the Email script available on the right side.
• Start adding you script!!

Helpful hints:

'#if' - this is used to start an 'if' statement.

'#set' - allows you to set/update the variable value.

'#elseif' - allows to perform diff. actions based on diff. conditions

'#end' - end the script

'##' - adding a comment

Example 1: Flexible Personalization

Sometimes the Data in the Database won't be having sufficient data for some contacts/Leads, so using personalization is little tricky in these cases.

While using Dear + Salutation + Last Name for our Email personalization. We pull the Token for each field and use in the Email.

If the Contact Name is Mr. Kiran P V, In the Email it will be shown as "Dear Mr. P V" but here is the catch, What if Salutation field is empty for some contacts, They will be viewing the email as "Dear  P V" which is very weird. 

Here we use the velocity scripting which can over come this problem.

Please see the below screen shot of the code.

This code checks first if the Salutation field is empty or not and then shows the personalization accordingly.

Example 2: Different Webinar Details based on Selection.

In this example User has the ability to register one of the three webinars available. The confirmation email should be having the Webinar details of the selected one. THis can be easily achieved by using Velocity scripting, Please see the below Script

Please use the fields which captures the Webinar value in the form on your instance, I just provided WebinarSelection, it may be some another field in your instance.

Conclusion:

Velocity scripting in Marketo is a powerful functionality for personalizing your marketing campaigns. It offers flexibility, efficiency, and real-time updates, allowing you to create highly tailored content. While it requires some learning and development time, the benefits it brings to your marketing efforts make it worth exploring. By understanding the fundamentals and utilizing examples like the ones provided, you can leverage Velocity scripting to unlock the true potential of personalization in Marketo.

We hope this blog post has shed light on the world of Velocity scripting and its uses in Marketo. If you have any questions or would like to dive deeper into this topic, feel free to reach out. Let's catch up in another topic!